Parental attitudes have greater correlation with pupil achievement than material home circumstances or variations in school and cl...assroom organization, instructional materials, and particular teaching practices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Our good schools today are much better than the best schools of yesterday. When I was your age and a pupil in school, our teachers... were our enemies.Can any thing ... be more painful to a friendly mind, than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relator or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My one pupil has begun his work with me, and I will give you a description how the lecture is conducted. It is the most important ...point, you know, that the tutor should be dignified and at a distance from the pupil, and that the pupil should be as much as possible degraded.... So I sit at the further end of the room; outside the door (which is shut) sits the scout; outside the outer door (also shut) sits the sub-scout: half-way downstairs sits the sub- sub-scout: and down in the yard sits the pupil.The questions are shouted from one to the other, and the answers come back in the same way--it is rather confusing till you are well used to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of t...he participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil... is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he i...s you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »